Summary: Call­by­Value Games
Samson Abramsky 1 and Guy McCusker 2
1 University of Edinburgh, Department of Computer Science, James Clerk Maxwell
Building, Edinburgh EH9 3JZ, Scotland. e­mail: samson@dcs.ed.ac.uk
2 St John's College, Oxford OX1 3JP, England. e­mail: mccusker@comlab.ox.ac.uk
Abstract. A general construction of models of call­by­value from mod­
els of call­by­name computation is described. The construction makes es­
sential use of the properties of sum types in common denotational models
of call­by­name. When applied to categories of games, it yields fully ab­
stract models of the call­by­value functional language PCFv , which can
be extended to incorporate recursive types, and of a language with local
references as in Standard ML.
1 Introduction
In recent years game semantics has emerged as a novel and intuitively appealing
approach to modelling programming languages. Its first success was in providing
a syntax­free description of a fully abstract model of PCF [10, 1, 15]; full abstrac­
tion results have also been obtained for untyped and recursively typed functional
languages, as well as languages with imperative features [12, 3]. However, none of
this work addressed the problem of modelling call­by­value languages---a major
shortcoming, given that many real­life languages, including Standard ML, use